Accelerating Business with Problem Management

One of the things that leaders will often hear from me is that in today's age you must be able to accelerate your business. Change comes fast and opportunities to innovate and disrupt disappear quickly. In order to accelerate business, you need to embrace continuous improvement.

Enterprises need Growth. Growth needs Acceleration. Acceleration needs Continuous Improvement.

All too often organizations quickly look to expensive programs and technology platforms to deliver growth, before looking at the low hanging fruit.

Problem Management (from ITIL - Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is the function of continually identifying and eliminating the root cause of problems that get in the way of your success. We do that by using proven methods of identifying what are the biggest barriers, analyzing those symptoms for root cause and then putting in solutions that eliminate or mitigate the business impact. By continuously eliminating what has the most negative impact on the success of your business, you will increase service/product uptake, improve customer experience, improve employee engagement, improve operational efficiency and ultimately get better business results. It is an essential tactic when your growth strategy relies on quality products and services.

Reduced negative customer impacts by over 50% in 12 months with no incremental investment

When I led an operations team, we needed to stabilize technology services in order to increase customer experience. By adopting problem management, we reduced the number of customer impacting outages by 50% and further reduced the time of the remaining outages. We accomplished that quickly and were sustaining it within12 months through a phase of very significant organizational change (DevOps transformation). Quite simply, it is one of the lowest budget and fastest ways to quickly improve your services.

In the example above, we used Problem Management within a technology team to achieve business results, by prioritizing impact in business valued categories. It works well within technology operations teams, as they are analytical by nature (root cause analysis), are motivated to resolve issues (for business and to reduce wake up calls) and have good tools - service desks will track incidents that help teams identify what the most impactful problems are (and then discuss with business to verify). They get into a regular rhythm of then removing the biggest problems, constantly. As the biggest problems get removed, the next set of 'big' ones are less impactful. Before long, the teams start to understand the importance of building better telemetry into technology and data to automatically identify and resolve problems. Mature problem management leads to the utopian self regenerating systems that technologists crave.

Businesses can do the same with call center and social platform data. When the data is combined with techniques such as Six Sigma and Lean to identify the most impactful friction points in a service or product, you can start to quantify the biggest friction points, whether its in the execution of your strategy, sales pipeline or customer service.

Once the business understands pain points / success blockers (problems), then the shift needs to be on identifying root cause, whether its people (structures, roles, training, communication, empowerment, behaviors, etc.), process (low value steps, idle time, etc.) or technology (automation, outages, technology system sprawl, etc.). This is where the acceleration starts to take place. As barrier after barrier is addressed, the value chain (strategy benefits chain, process value chain, sales pipeline, etc.) gets faster.

In summary, a business led approach to problem management on customer products and services can help organizations grow their revenue, through continuous improvement. It doesn't always take an expensive technology platform. In fact, if you adopt strong Problem Management, you will be far more ready for the bumps and bruises that come with platforms like ERPs, CRMs or new business systems like DevOps and Product Management.

It's not about old ITIL Practices vs new Agile Practices. Success comes from adopting both. That is why it is called DevOps.

Agile practices such as DevOps deliver more frequently, however if you are merely reacting to symptoms faster (chasing fires) you may only be accelerating delivery, not business value. By removing a blocker on an existing digital sales process, you could easily have better results than a new feature. Problem Management needs to feed business Product Managers for better backlog grooming in DevOps. Problem Management shouldn't just feed IT Ops and Dev needs to understand that ITIL works very well with DevOps. Business benefits from it coming together and should help drive it to happen, by asking for the enhancements (root causes) that make the existing value chains better.

Want some help? Contact me if:

1) you would like to learn how you can use Problem Management to grow your business through existing products and services or to help accelerate your strategy

2) You would like to learn how to leverage and integrate traditional service management techniques like problem management into modern Agile techniques like Product Management and DevOps.